


Shadow Key

by kyallu



Category: Naruto
Genre: F/M, POV Outsider
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-07-09
Updated: 2011-07-09
Packaged: 2018-02-22 01:05:19
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 955
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/2488727
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/kyallu/pseuds/kyallu
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Karin is a consummate liar, but what Uchiha Sasuke and Haruno Sakura do not say out loud puts even her to shame.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Shadow Key

**Author's Note:**

> Originally written for SasuSaku Month 2011 - Now super AU. Canon up until the Kage Summit arc.

Her pride keeps her from acknowledging the pink-haired kunoichi at the Summit, though recognition filters into her subconscious from the corners of her mind, where she shackles stray facts she does not wish to know. And Karin is a kunoichi, a consummate, impeccable liar, capable of fooling even herself when she wants to, if never for very long; she regards the other girl as one who has briefly crossed her path and will pass by without a trace.

At first.

But as irrational words fly through the air, almost solid in the weight imbuing each syllable, the chains that bind memories of pink-and-blond and fans-and-keys begun to crack under the frigid cold sweeping through her body in relentless waves. The pink is a trigger: it reminds her of the pink-haired civilian they had stumbled across on the journey to the Summit. They passed her by in no more than five seconds, but for the difference in Sasuke's demeanour before and after, it could have been five months.

Sasuke does not keep photos, or other similar items that are valued only in his rare sentimental moments, of which she has seen none but believes to exist. Karin knows this because the night after they passed the pink-haired girl -- after which Sasuke said not a thing, and refused to rebuke Suigetsu in the way Karin had come to associate so strongly with his character -- she had gone through his things. It had infuriated her that the person who held her heart could be so easily swayed by the face of a useless civilian whose mind he knew nothing of. She found nothing of note except a single key that she had already seen Sasuke palming multiple times, removing his grip finger by finger, as though attempting to leave it behind, but never quite managing to let it go; she made a shadow copy anyway and quietly returned it.

(But now, as Sasuke casts her away -- as though she is nothing more than a tool that has outlived its usefulness and he's accepting a new one -- she knows it is not the civilian's face that had caught his eye and triggered his abrupt change in manner, but her most striking, unforgettable feature.)

\- : -

Konoha is breathtaking in the proportion of its populace that seems not only well cared for, but happy too, Karin decides, from the little she manages to see while being jerked into Torture and Interrogation. It is just her luck that her captors number among those who seem the exact opposite: angry and hostile, or sad and infinitely unreadable.

The pink-haired kunoichi seems somewhere in between, but then, she is not really one of the spooks who populate the bedtime stories of not only Konoha, but shinobi-in-training the entire ninja world around. Karin expects her to stay for the interrogation, but either her emotional resilience fails her or other duties call, for the kunoichi (Sakura, she thinks grudgingly) leaves Karin at the door. They do not meet again for over a month -- several weeks of which, Karin sees no one at all but the white-masked interrogators -- until there comes the day that words have failed her, and actions become the preferred currency of information.

Karin would have suspected that Sakura had been waiting for them in the Uchiha compound, were those green eyes not quite so wide with surprise, not quite so glistening with unshed tears.

Sakura's calm settles in. It does not falter until the ANBU -- who had kindly refrained from applying force in order to coerce information that Karin, betrayed by Sasuke, already offered of her free will -- return to Karin the shadow-key she made a month ago. Their leader wants to know where it came from; Karin suppresses the urge to wonder aloud why this could not have been asked while in the dungeon.

"His bag," Karin says simply. "I don't know what it was for."

"Then why keep it?"

"It was his," Karin says, handing it to the interrogator. She does not want it any longer.

The group tries the key on several rooms in the main clan house, but it is not until it falls into Sakura's hands -- and, to Karin's utter shock, the interrogators do not even protest, apparently because Sakura and the interrogator and a kid called Naruto have an understanding -- that tumblers click and a lock turns without jamming.

There is the oddest, bemused expression on Sakura's face when she sees the inside of the room: bare and dust-covered except for the shrine leaning wearily against one wall, plaques bearing the names of dead Uchiha sprawling above it. Sakura merely shakes her head, and murmurs under her breath: "Typical."

Then she leaves.

Karin has not survived for so long under Orochimaru, and then Sasuke, by letting words flow off her tongue uncontrolled, so she does not think aloud the oddity that the corridor outside the room is not at all dusty; she merely watches Sakura go, the pink of her hair ridiculously vibrant even in the gloom, adding two and two together in her head.

Despite her current situation as captive of ANBU, Karin cannot help but wonder about the weight of intangible bars around someone's being, and if they are stronger, or weaker than steel. Or both. Karin does not know.

Karin, after all, has fallen out of love with the person who attempted to kill her at the Summit. Sakura has not.

And unless he is always shaken by civilian women and the key is made of superglue, neither (despite what he feels being more complex, yet less developed, than love and despite only the edges of his heart being touched and despite attempting multiple times to stop caring, neither, in the end) has Sasuke.

 

\--

fin


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